Free American Isis by Carl Rollyson Page A

up various intimations of immortality. Wordsworth, Berkeley—a host of thinkers and artists—seem to suffuse Sylvia’s synthesis of her own experience, leading to a remarkable statement about the “radio programs … all around us, clogging the air, needing only a certain sensitive mechanism to make them a reality, a fact.” Sylvia would later write for the radio—the wireless as it was called in Britain—realizing how powerfully this spoken medium could penetrate the psyche, provoking the listener to create a simulacrum of the world. She thought of Hamlet’s line, “Thinking makes it so.” She thought of what she had made of her father’s death. Where Christian Science faltered was in its inability to distinguish between truth and the individual’s “dream-world,” valid enough for that person, for Sylvia herself, but was it near to the truth that others imagined? She could not say. She could only observe that these Christian Scientists certainly treated their beliefs as real—just as real as her “dream-bubble of reality,” a phrase that wonderfully captures the evanescence of perception. What was unchanging fact? Could it be found in a laboratory? These questions recall Dick’s own certitudes, which Sylvia could not share. Sylvia seems more comfortable with Wordsworth’s notion that we half-perceive and half-create our world; she was not willing to take the knower out of what is known. Perhaps the best one could do is master what she called the “counter positions,” the dialectic between competing versions of truth.
    What had especially pleased Sylvia about “Sunday at the Mintons” is that although she had started out simply modeling Elizabeth on herself, she ended by creating a world that was not merely derived from her own. That development seemed like a breakthrough, creating a work of art that transcended her own concerns—creating, in fact, a story that dramatized the very tensions between dream and reality that her journal passage probed.
    On 2 August, Sylvia wrote to her mother about meeting Valerie Gendron, who wrote love stories for the pulps and ladies magazines. Sylvia wanted to spend the day talking to a writer who had been “through the mill.” A subsequent visit with Val resulted in Sylvia’s decision to follow her mentor’s advice: Write fifteen hundred words a day, no matter what. Think of it as singing scales and doing warm-up exercises, Val told her during a five-hour talkfest that Sylvia treasured as one of her best adventures as a writer. It was a wonderful workout that included Val’s critique of a Plath story, a gesture Sylvia regarded as exceptionally generous. Sylvia poured over this experience in her journal, describing in detail the bookmobile Val ran to help support herself in a sort of disheveled independence that to Sylvia seem scrumptious—as did the three hunks of cake she duly recorded eating. Suddenly Sylvia’s journal brimmed with drafts of the kind of romantic stories that women’s magazines preferred.
    Pleasant dates with Dick may also have stimulated some of this boy-girl fiction. In the quiet, scheduled summer of 1952, Sylvia seems to have suspended her doubts about Dick. A day off from babysitting felt like the lid on her life was blown off. She needed the security of knowing that in a few weeks she would be back at Smith and immersed in the delirium of study. Mrs. Cantor treated her like Little Red Riding Hood when Dick called one night near 11 p.m. Where did Sylvia meet so many boys? Mrs. Canter wondered. Now the unregulated atmosphere of the Belmont, the midnight-to-dawn dances and beach parties Sylvia described to Enid Epstein, a Smith classmate, seemed preferable to the confining Cantors. The Belmont was like “ college with the lid off.”
    A second encounter with Eddie before Sylvia began her junior year at Smith caused trouble. He judged